


The Toaster Oven Incident

by Regalli



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Night Vale, Science sometimes means destroyed kitchen appliances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 08:04:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Regalli/pseuds/Regalli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos had friends before Night Vale. Scientist friends. And once upon a time, he and those scientist friends lived in an apartment together. </p>
<p>Woe be to the kitchen appliances that crossed their paths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Toaster Oven Incident

The thing with the Toaster Oven Incident – and it was definitely a big enough deal to merit the capital letters denoting it not just as an incident but an Incident – was that it could have happened to any of them. It wasn’t one of those catastrophes involving kitchen appliances that could only have been Arty’s doing, the way That Thing with the Refrigerator had Carlos’s name all over it or The Great Door Catastrophe was totally Quinton. All five of them had accidentally destroyed at least one piece of furniture. That happened when you took five young, very intelligent, SLIGHTLY overenthusiastic scientists together in one apartment, especially when they hadn’t yet learned things like “labelling your samples” and “having multiple fire extinguishers in the kitchen.” But everyone agreed in hindsight that the Toaster Oven Incident was one of those things that would have happened even if they had all been, say, accountants. 

Actually, wait. Because the other thing with the Toaster Oven Incident was that it requires a certain understanding of the key player.

The toaster oven was a 1940s Lasko Toastove that Quinton had found for sale in some flea market in Birmingham while he was home for winter break. It was his and Carlos’s last year of undergrad, and the roommates were in desperate need of easy breakfast foods they could actually afford. Carlos could cook, but that required a certain level of alertness he lacked first thing in the morning. It was a nice toaster oven, even if the white enamel was dirty from decades of use, with two slots for toast and a little warming oven and a hotplate. It was, in short, perfect for their needs.

It continued to perform admirably through grad school, after Sammy had joined their little group, so it was generally agreed that the move from one little San Francisco apartment to another had been the one that did it. By this point the trio had met Bailey and Artemisia and become a quintet, and Sammy and Bailey had begun dating. This annoyed Sammy’s roommates, because while they loved him and loved Bailey and generally speaking approved of their friends dating each other, she was staying over half the week and their apartment was tight enough on space as it was and also Arty had just shown up on their doorstep and thrown herself at her friends’ mercy after her student loans had reached critical debt levels.

It was therefore decided that the five of them should move in together. The problems with the toaster oven began almost immediately after. Suddenly the toaster part wouldn’t work without banging it on the side a couple times and the hotplate wouldn’t work at all. As the resident engineer of their little group, Bailey took it upon herself to take the toaster oven apart and see if she could find what was wrong. When that turned up nothing, Quinton claimed that as the toaster oven’s original owner (even though technically he had bought it as a late Christmas/New Year’s/Whatever, we survived finals present for Carlos), he should be the one to take it apart. His test was similarly inconclusive. This continued for two weeks until everyone had fiddled with the toaster at least once and, one weekend after Carlos found the ancient scans of the toaster’s original instruction manual and schematics, teamed up for a joint disassembling and reassembling of the thing. Nothing worked, though the hotplate did start actually heating things again, and the five resigned themselves to the fact that their toaster oven required a beating before each use and no amount of science could explain exactly why.

And that was how, one fine Saturday morning after over a year of percussive maintenance in the name of warm, toasty bagels, Arty woke up, put her bagel in the slot, gave it the standard bang…

And woke up the rest of the apartment when the toaster oven died with a bang of its own, followed shortly by the smell of smoke and the sound of a 20-year-old woman shrieking in distress. 

To this day, none of them are entirely sure what caused it to explode, or why it chose that Saturday in particular to do so. It wasn’t exactly in any shape afterwards to do a toaster oven autopsy. The fact that Artemisia was the only one there to witness the exact explosion and she and Sammy have a long-running debate as to whether it was an explosion or merely a fast-acting fire doesn’t help. (Though it does make for a fun show when the two have had a few too many drinks) What they are certain of is that:  
1) The toaster oven went boom,   
2) It almost set fire to the laminate countertops, and  
3) It was definitely not salvageable once the fire was put out. 

Fortunately for their countertops, fire extinguisher one of three was kept on the adjacent wall and had been ever since the aforementioned Thing with the Refrigerator, and nothing woke one up like smoke and possible explosions first thing in the morning. By the time Carlos made it to the kitchen, much less Bailey in such a rush she forgot her glasses, the toaster oven was mostly extinguished and content to smolder.

The kitchen smelled of burning enamel for months.

\--

“- And that’s why we leave antique toaster oven maintenance to professionals,” Sammy said, finishing the story.  
“How did you not get evicted for that?” Cecil asked, leaning back against the kitchen counter. The five scientists started fidgeting in unison.  
“Reasons?” Bailey said, studying the zipper of her leather jacket.  
“Right. Reasons,” Quinton agreed, nodding fervently.  
“Reasons which we are not allowed to discuss but which are entirely legal,” Carlos added.  
“… You had blackmail on the landlord, didn’t you,” Cecil said, grinning. The others just groaned.


End file.
